‘How the light gets in’

Lily Macrae

6th of September - 30th of September

Lily Macrae’s debut solo exhibition with Soho Revue ‘How The Light Gets In’, is a body of work made in the artist’s Clydeside studio in Govan, Glasgow. Macrae has a highly original creative process in which she subverts the way we understand painting as a medium. She has developed a subtractive method of working, applying and then removing paint in an almost excavational mode to reveal forms that lie dormant beneath the surface. To create the dramatic ‘chiaroscuro’ that characterises her work, Lily rubs back and manipulates layers of pigment, harnessing the light that emanates from within each piece as a guiding force in her construction of an image, whilst plunging some areas into dramatic obscurity and darkness. In this sense, the act of painting is simultaneously an act of excavation and construction for Macrae.

Macrae reappropriates imagery from a diverse range of sources which range from film-stills to Old Master paintings, Baroque masterpieces in particular. Seeks out reference imagery that hints at drama, movement and powerful light effects, her work retains strong fragments of the historical and cultural references from which she is inspired. The dynamism, chiaroscuro and dramatic force of artists such as Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Peter Paul Rubens have had a huge impact on the artist and she is fascinated by the way in which the narratives within in such paintings can be reinterpreted, forging a dialogue between past and contemporary modes of representation. Lily reimagines these stories through a contemporary lens.

Often, what Lily takes from her reference imagery is as simple as a banal or familiar motif such as candles, hands, bodies, forms which she reexamines and transformed after a period of cropping, merging and reusing source material to form something new. Hands feature prominently in this body of work, signalling to this most ancient of artistic tools and gesturing to her characteristically bold ‘maniera.’ Facilitating gesture, her depiction of hands also speaks to their historic symbolism of power and human connection and the power of our gesticulations to both portray and speak out our inner emotions, fostering a universal human understanding that transcends verbal and written language.